About and around pop culture

When it comes to writing about cinema, the bad films are as important as the good ones.

“What makes you go watch this film despite knowing full well that it is nothing but trash?” Some version of this question crops up every time a critic reviews a “bad” movie. As subjective as the qualifier is, there are two kinds of “bad” movie. The first is a movie from a big production house or featuring a big star, or a movie made by a well-known director, or a movie about an issue – even if such a film is deemed bad content-wise, these other factors are seen as contributing to its “review-worthiness.” The idea, I suppose, is that people have heard about these films, so they’d want to know about the critic’s response to them.

We’re talking about the other kind of “bad movie,” the kind whose trailers leave us in little doubt that there’s not going to be anything good here. That’s where the “What makes you go watch this film…?” question comes in. As critics, we’re being asked: Why are you wasting your time reviewing these films? What can you possibly hope to find in them to write about?

That word – “about” – is what most people think a review centres around. What is the film about? (The subject, in other words.) Which aspects of the film is the reviewer/critic writing about? (Stars, technical values, and so forth.) But there’s another word in the context of a review, and that’s “around.” You can write about a film. You can also write around a film. And it’s in the latter case that reviews of “bad films” become important – not always, of course, but sometimes.

Take the Sunny Leone film Ek Paheli Leela, released this April. Writing about it makes the critic observe that it’s a reincarnation drama spanning 300 years. Writing around it makes a critic muse about female nudity in cinema down the years, especially when it comes to the heroine (as opposed to the vamp). Or take the Tamil film Nannbenda, which was released around the same time. Writing about it makes the critic observe that the film centres on a man’s attempts to woo a reluctant woman. Writing around it is an opportunity to question how a film with such adult humour was certified “U” by the censors.

In other words, the “about” evaluates the film as a work of art, to be judged on the basis of criteria related to the art – say, the way the screenplay has been written, or the way an actor acts. The “around,” on the other hand treats the film as a cultural product and uses the film to talk about our culture, then and now.

There is a tendency to dismiss cinema as “pop culture” – or popular culture, as opposed to “high culture,” which the writer-philosopher Roger Scruton once described as “the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.” There’s always been some kind of snobbishness among these educated people when it comes to cinema, as if it was not as worthy as the other arts. But for better or worse, with increasingly distracted people spending less time on art and literature and suchlike, popular culture appears to have become the only culture.

And cinema being the most dominant form of pop culture, writing about it is like leaving behind a cultural record. Critics, really, are some kind of cultural commentators, even if the commentating happens within the very specific context of a film review. The around is within the about, and this is why it is as important to write about the so-called “bad films” as it is to write about the obviously good ones.

Of course, it is not always going to be possible to find an around angle. Sometimes a bad film is just a bad film. There’s barely any about, leave alone a cultural aspect – yes, like her or not, Sunny Leone is an aspect of our culture today – that can be teased out and written about at length. But even then, just writing about the film is creating a historical record, that such a film existed, that it featured these actors and was made by these technicians. It’s like how Wham! gets no respect from “serious” music lovers but the band’s music is absolutely essential in order to understand the 1980s – or the subsequent career of George Michael, for that matter. Good music, bad music, good cinema, bad cinema – it’s all created by people in a particular moment for other people in the same moment, based on what they like, what they want, which means that a hundred years from now, a film like Ek Paheli Leela will tell people what we were like in 2015. If that doesn’t make a movie “review-worthy,” I don’t know what does.

It’s like how Wham! gets no respect from “serious” music lovers but the band’s music is absolutely essential in order to understand the 1980s

I partly agree and disagree with this. The approach, that is, and not the case of Wham! in particular. As you said in your next line or so, a film or any work of art is made in a particular moment and appreciated by people living in that moment. That being the case, pop culture is also extremely ephemeral. So, Ek Paheli Leela may capture a particular fleeting moment of 2015 but would it define 2015 itself? Whitney Houston’s cover of I will always love you may have defined 1994 to some extent perhaps but does it ALONE define the 90s, to the exclusion of, say, Nevermind? No. So ultimately we don’t really know what art defines its time or captures the proverbial zeitgeist and what doesn’t. To illustrate this point, an Indian critic of English movies might deem Baby’s Day Out an important film for the 90s because it was much loved here but it was widely panned in America, including by Ebert & Siskel and failed there while it fared much better in Asia. We are inherently biased to believe films that speak to us are more important than others. But really all we know is some films find a bigger audience and some don’t, which is actually a factor of several variables and not just its cultural relevance.

I am amazed by your ability to write about so many things. I don’t think anyone else is out there writing articles on subjects as varying as James Deen’s bottom, the work-life seesaw, how I read etc. Things related to music and movies is expected from you, but the sheer ability to write about so many stuffs day in day out is fascinating.

Madan, what you say, seems (to me) to be exactly the same thing as what BR is saying. That all art is important.

I, for one, have never understood why some people look down on certain genres. Why is Wham! considered inferior to George Michael’s later music? ‘Last Christmas’ has given me (still does) as much listening joy as ‘Faith’ or ‘A different corner’. Why is pop or country looked down upon by some, in comparison to soul or jazz?

The funny thing is, George Michael himself was quoted then as saying (when asked why he was going solo at a point when Wham! was so hugely successful) that he wanted to make more serious music : “I do not want to be remembered as a couple of boys prancing around in shorts.” (a referance, I guess , to the ‘Wake me up’ video). Or something like that (I quote from memory).

Of course, much later, we learnt exactly why (not without a little heart ache for the millions who had crushed on George Michael, including me) the much less talented Andrew Ridgely was allowed to be a part of Wham! in the first place and that the real reason they broke up was probably that Ridgely got married.

Perhaps endurability is a good yardstick in pop culture for judging how “classic” or how good something is? If people still enjoy a song or a movie or a book after decades, then it can be considered really good?

I have read Jane Austen (or Hardy) several times, but can still read her again. While I cannot stand more than a single reading of most other books. Most pop songs become unbearable after a few hearings. But not so (for me) with Johnny Cash, the Beatles, Abba, Pat Boone, Don Mclean or Rafi or Mukesh. But I suppose there are person to person variations for this too? Perhaps there are people who never tire of hearing ‘Funky town’? ( I remember some next door neighbours who used to play that loudly, on a loop, in the eighties till we were ready to climb the walls in exasperation)

Madan, what you say, seems (to me) to be exactly the same thing as what BR is saying. That all art is important.

All art is equally as important or unimportant, yes. But the relevance of socio-cultural contextualisation of art is suspect in my view. How do we really know what people liked in the 80s and why they liked it? We tend to be biased towards those hit films and hit songs that are still in circulation. But they are in circulation now because we have found something to like in them. It is not necessary that they were the most liked of their time. Wall Street is considered a classic but it received a mixed reception in its time. My father watched the sequel Money Never Sleeps and said to have really liked it. I told him it received largely underwhelming reviews. Perhaps 20 years hence, Money Never Sleeps will go up in the estimation of critics. But what then is it supposed to say about the times we live in if it failed to capture an audience when first released? A work of art is produced by an individual artist or a team responding to external stimuli and drawing inspiration from within, i.e, their own life experiences. Likewise, the audience finds when appreciating a work of art that it touches a chord or incites their curiosity in some respect. This response is unique for every individual and that is why views on art are so divergent. Interpretations of the theme and message (if any) of a work of art can also vary wildly.

In a discussion I was a part of not so long ago, I interpreted the Rush song Trees as an anti-trade union/pro-capitalism rant. Another inferred a foretelling of the NAFTA and its consequences. A third stridently rebuked us for attempting to derive meaning when the lyricist Neil Peart had said it was just a sort of musical cartoon where he tried to get trees to converse like humans. When the views on merely what a 4 minute track was about can vary so much, what is it supposed to tell us anyway about the culture of the times? Maybe I am alone in holding this view but I have never understood the point of socio-cultural contextualisation and reading of subtexts thereof in art and generally end up wishing more time was devoted to appreciating the artistic, technical aspects of art. Seriously, people wouldn’t rather want to know how did they do it, how was such a work of beauty created?

I have read Jane Austen (or Hardy) several times, but can still read her again. While I cannot stand more than a single reading of most other books.

There you go. I read Sense and Sensibility and couldn’t stand the thing and vowed never to return to Austen though I am told Pride and Prejudice is a better read. I would sooner read Twilight than Sense and Sensibility. And it’s not for want of requisite ‘high-minded’ cred; I have read and enjoyed Crime and Punishment for instance. I just don’t get Austen. Art evokes diverse responses. It is too subjective to derive broad trends from. I come back to the 80s again, so they are known as the decade of New Wave and synth pop but the 80s also birthed extreme metal and saw some sort of a blues rock revival through the great Stevie Ray Vaughan. Chris Rea’s prescient Road to Hell is very Knopfler-like and could have easily been a 70s track. Within cultures are multiple sub cultures and within sub cultures too are individuals stamping their own identity, consciously or sub consciously. And as art has become more and more conscious of this, we have moved further and further away from the Golden Middle, if there ever was one.

Madan: Maybe I am alone in holding this view but I have never understood the point of socio-cultural contextualisation and reading of subtexts thereof in art and generally end up wishing more time was devoted to appreciating the artistic, technical aspects of art. Seriously, people wouldn’t rather want to know how did they do it, how was such a work of beauty created?

You certainly aren’t alone, and you’ve picked exactly the subject that I would (hopefully) devote my life’s work to. This has been a subject of ongoing debate in the literary circles (read more on the Canon Wars of the 90s if you care to) and I’m mighty glad to say the tide is slowly, impercetibly maybe, but decisively turning back in our favour. I write about this rather passionately because this is the subject of an academic paper I’m now working on, and a serious conviction I’ve antagonised many for.

Madan: I am not making as… big a point as you seem to think. You’re talking “socio-cultural contextualisation of art.” I’m simply talking about chronicling it, leaving behind a cultural record of “what we were like,” what we saw, etc.

Sunny Leone doesn’t singlehandedly define this period, but she’s certainly ONE of the many cultural components around us. Just like Wham! were. You cannot understand the 80s with only Wham!. But you cannot define the 80s without them either. And part of that, I’m saying, comes from the records a critic (as a cultural commentator) leaves behind.

Why is pop or country looked down upon by some, in comparison to soul or jazz?

Are you sure people do? I’d have said the same as “Why is pop or jazz looked down upon by some, in comparison to soul or country” for that is the general impression I get around me. Maybe we get a sense of what is high/low music/literature from what our parents and uncles and aunts. Mine has always been a country music intensive family and I always think that if I get lost or something I should just sing “Country Roads, take me home to the place I belong” and some family member will materialise out of thin air. 😛

Madan:

I read Sense and Sensibility and couldn’t stand the thing and vowed never to return to Austen.

I have not read S&S but I see what you mean. I never could understand why ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ is hilariously witty. Mild sarcasm, yes. But that line is given an iconic status in the world of quoteables :S But she is alright if you don’t expect TOO much.

How do we really know what people liked in the 80s and why they liked it?

If we want to know for SURE, and that too about 100% of all those who lived in the 80s then, no we will never know. But we can know a certain something from how famous some movies or songs or books get. Say the popularity of Elvis, Beatles, ABBA, MJ, etc do say something about 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s. But it is not ok to ignore the other music artists or other arts (Paintings, Movies, Literature, Broadway etc) if you really want to see the era in your mind’s eye. The more Retro stuff you seek out the more you’d know about the era. But you need to have a certain something for History in the first place. I cannot watch a movie like Nenjil Or Aalayam or Chinna Thambi without thinking about the sensiblities of the people of that era. I cannot watch a MGR/Saroja Devi song without musing about certain things. One day our grandchildren are going to ask about the popularity of a song like “Why this Kolaveri di”. That song did mark a certain milestone.

Er, let me just step back and say this: While it’s a brilliant feeling to have seen a film the way a director intended, it’s not the only way. Once the film is made, a director is no longer the only author. As a viewer, I reserve the right to my own readings, become my own author 🙂

a comment under the review of Masaan.

I was going through the Kadal comments section where a link is posted that defends the same for books. In which case, I guess, you really cannot protest too much if Madan (or one of us) took the same liberty with your writing (reading and seeing more in it than you ever meant to say) 😉

Being a hard core country music fan and having often seen comments deriding the genre, Im really happy to think you consider it high brow Rahini.

But then again, there is a lot of crap made under that genre, apart from some really lovely songs, so its not like I do not understand the criticism.

There was this movie I saw many years back that pokes fun at the tendency for country songs to have really long names. Like this one (that I read somewhere has a guiness record for the longest name for a song) :

Madan is still free to think what he thinks. Because I have this forum and because I can interact with him, I’m choosing to do so. I’m just continuing the dialogue. I’m not trying to say, “No, you are wrong. This is how it is.”

My reply to Madan doesn’t make my contention “right”. Of course the true meaning of anything (insofar as something can be categorised as “true”) resides in the viewer/reader.

I’m simply talking about chronicling it, leaving behind a cultural record of “what we were like,” what we saw, etc.

I get that. I am referring to the writing around movies part of your post. “The “around,” on the other hand treats the film as a cultural product and uses the film to talk about our culture, then and now.” But writing around a mediocre film at the most serves the purpose of an interesting intellectual jigsaw puzzle of some sort for the reviewer’s readers. Finding some cultural context in which to discuss the film (in this case, nudity in art) doesn’t necessarily bestow it any great deal of importance. In other words, it is not that the film by itself provoked a conversation among the public-at-large on nudity. It is a context you as a seasoned film critic have manufactured through your dexterity and creativity. I commend that but that is also why I take efforts to write around rather than about films with a pinch of salt. It is possible twenty years later, an arts student will come across this piece and promptly write a thesis on Ek Paheli Leela’s seminal contribution to nudity in cinema and I would say phooey. As long as it is recognised that it is a nice fun exercise with a little bit of infotainment along the way, it’s fine. The trouble begins when people take it more seriously than that, and unfortunately many people do. Like Ajit Balakrishnan comparing Chetan Bhagat to Charles Dickens. Yeah, do let me know when CB writes about the homeless of Mumbai.

Yup, since I haven’t, I can keep a reasonably open mind about it, notwithstanding the samples you have just presented. With Austen, (for me) it’s like once you have consumed burnt food at a hotel you don’t feel like eating there again though you know, rationally, that you may just have got them on a bad day rather than the place being bad every day of the year.

But it is not ok to ignore the other music artists or other arts (Paintings, Movies, Literature, Broadway etc) if you really want to see the era in your mind’s eye.

Sure, and the question then is where do we draw the line. One single subculture from one art form, say just rock music as opposed to the entire Western music repository, alone can consume a lifetime’s worth of listening. How do we consume and make sense of an entire decade’s worth of art? It’s impossible. So what critics typically do is to focus on the ‘highlights’ of the decade but these highlights themselves are informed in turn by a combination of audience reception and critical acclaim. So they end up leaving out a lot. In the pursuit of understanding our history, I would say art is but a small subset of our overall way of life. There are other aspects like the language spoken and the words in circulation in the language at the time, the attire, the cuisine, what the people did/do to make a living, what regard were their rulers (democratically elected or otherwise) held in, what wars if any they fought. These I would argue are a lot more reliable because art is coloured by the impressions of the artist. Which is good from the point of view of art because we appreciate it for the imagination but imagination also plays fast and loose with the truth. I just watched Saving Mr Banks the other day which is a beautiful film but also one that does a great PR job for Mr Walt.
I cannot watch a movie like Nenjil Or Aalayam or Chinna Thambi without thinking about the sensiblities of the people of that era.

Sure, I also enjoy doing this as an exercise of indulging my curiosity. But I generally hesitate to draw CONCLUSIONS about a particular era from art.

@tonks: Some people questioned B Rangan’s credibility and objectivity over that Kadal review because he (having written a book on MR’s films) praised it and they didn’t like the film. So his comment was in defence of retaining his right to reading the film as he saw it and not to defer to the consensus opinion.

@ Iswarya: Thanks for the heads up on Canon Wars. I have only been to find a little bit of material so far on the net and would be glad to read any more articles you can share. I find PC-ness in USA, a country stereotyped here in India as the birthplace of choice English abuses, quite hilarious at times. Here I am having spent my school years reading mostly British/American authors with a little bit of Ruskin Bond and other Indian authors here and there and they think making kids read Mark Twain is unfair? Are whites some other alien species and not humans? I don’t know where exactly you stand on this but these are my views anyhow. 😛

Hilarious link, Rahini. While I agree that Twilight is terribly written, teaches questionable morals, has punctuation and grammar mistakes that even I noticed while reading (I’m usually blissfully ignorant), has poorly developed characters and a plot that had one skimming through many parts due to boredom and wishing fervently that YA fiction could be restricted to the likes of John Green, in Stephanie Meyer’s defense :

1) The falling-in-love portion in the first book had great emotional power and is perhaps what made the books so popular

2) The concept of good, ‘vegetarian’, vampires was novel (even though you wished they did not sparkle in the sun)

Madan, I got that. I was only pulling his leg a little, because it seemed a little amusing that you were doing to him, what he is often accused here of doing to others in reviews (over analysing). My comment was meant in a tongue in cheek way. Was it under the OKK thread that there was a comment (regarding some C centre distributer who passes out) about humour being a tough nut to crack?

tonks: I did overanalyse, maybe because this is a bit of a pet peeve for me. A lot of works by unheralded artists get dismissed out of hand for purportedly lacking cultural cred, when really all they lack is a big fat promotional budget. This thing called pop culture ensures that a piece of music, no matter how mediocre, remains in circulation for years and years because it has been assigned some sense of importance, whether legit or dubious. Something like Careless Whisper. 😉

Ha ha. Careless whisper, You can do magic and She’s a maniac were so much overplayed on the radio during my teens (and I was passionately Radio ga ga in those days 😉 ) that I’m off them for life, culturally important or not and my humongous GM crush nonwithstanding 😉

“I have never understood the point of socio-cultural contextualisation and reading of subtexts thereof in art and generally end up wishing more time was devoted to appreciating the artistic, technical aspects of art. Seriously, people wouldn’t rather want to know how did they do it, how was such a work of beauty created?”

Very simply because, art, however unique it may be for people affected by it, is also a source of material about that point in time & space for historians, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists. Your question debunks the very basis of social research. The thing about social sciences is, you may never know for sure, as you would in mathematics, that 1+1 = 2. (My research in the social sciences is actually about the sociology of scientists – trying to establish that science is not all that exact and apolitical as is believed to be either). But, it is valuable to try and figure out whatever one can, as much as one can because, as 23-am Pulikesi would say “Varalaru mukkiyam amaichare”!

Think of art as something like archaeological finds or as documents journalists try to procure from governments/corporations or interviews recorded. How do we take what an interviewer says at face value? Simply speaking, we don’t. We try to corroborate it using other interviews, documents, understanding the social, cultural, economic context it comes from etc. When you say that the only thing that sets apart art with ‘cultural cred’ from others which don’t, what you are essentially doing is in fact a Marxist analysis of art – that capital is what sets one kind from the other. Of course, you don’t like that it is so, But, that is the analysis you are presenting. A historian/researcher would ideally be trained to look at how much money was spent on a certain piece of art, what kind of newspapers wrote about it, what kind of cities was it exhibited in and so on, before deriving any socio-cultural thesis about it or the time and place it was set in.

The question of ‘why’ (as you ask ‘why do researchers do this instead of that’?) is just as important as how. And that, as I understand it, is different from the canon wars of the literary world. From a sociologist point of view, a canon is not something that is necessarily good or even something that necessarily defines a period or place, but something that evoked some kind of response from the public/ government/ media at large, good or bad. Of course, as you say, this response may be owing to a fat marketing budget, and that is something that should be taken into account. Someone like Jane Austen, for instance, is important not because of what great books she wrote, but because of how her books were unique in the socio-cultural setting she wrote in. So, the line ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,’ may only be mildly sarcastic now, but must have been biting at that time. I don’t find Austen a great read either, but I can’t ignore her if I were researching that period and place.

To present a completely unfair comparison (in my opinion, in terms of quality), I cannot ignore Chetan Bagat if I were researching the sweep of right wing politics or contempt towards welfare economics in India at this time. Literature can debate if CB is worthy of canonisation, but for sociologists, he is already canon (unfortunately, in my opinion). Yes, it is true he writes trash and is nothing like Dickens. But, both are privileged men in their respective societies with money to spare so they coud write about what interests them. Yes, the author’s class, caste, gender would also be something that a sociologist would taken into account – apart from how much money was spent on the marketing budget of their books.

Neena: Ha, greetings from the other side of the fence! Completely understand your argument – been living with it for too long now. 🙂 Thomas Kuhn, with his “paradigm” re-definition, is enough for me to relate to what you say is your subject of research.

My point in reply to yours, and perhaps in answer to what Madan wanted to know about additional resources on the canon wars would be this – Why are sociologists or worse, people improperly trained in either sociology or literary analysis taking over the literature departments both in the West and in India (basically all over the world)? Why, in the name of interdisciplinarity, is the teaching of literature losing its self-respect and identity as a sovereign and worthwhile pursuit? To come a little closer to Neena’s area, why is the section of funding under the general label of “humanities” being hijacked in major portions by sociology and allied sciences that have taken over the study of literature to the point that we may not have even have a decent percentage (I know better than to cook up numbers while talking to a sociologist) of students from literature majors who are capable of analysing art as art/objects of beauty and craft in about the next ten years if present trends continue? (Actually, I do have hard data on this subject from my own research, with all the standard provisos, but too lazy to dig it up and quote here.)

Madan, if you haven’t yet bumped into Harold Bloom in your reading about the canon wars so far (which is impossible), this would be a lovely occasion to read the first and last chapters of his Western Canon. As for its application to India, OK, we don’t have much hard data here (I for one collected some for my masters thesis), but the sweeping trends are broadly similar. Syllabuses are going PC with a vengeance, the definition of literature turning increasingly porous (you might be amused to learn about this new genre of literature called ‘testimonio’ – please look up), and notions of ‘literary’ quality turning unspeakably taboo. (The latest ‘gyan’ is that literary quality is a product of class privilege, opportunities to nurture the so-called talent, promotional budget, opportunities in terms of gender, sexuality and race to get published at all, and so forth – which at the end of the day doesn’t explain why the children of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are not great literary craftsmen like William Shakespeare or Jane Austen! Wait, did I just use the word ‘great’? Oh, let me now go atone my sins by reading some Marx or Foucault.)

Neena, I know this does not refute what you say at all, but is merely a different sphere of interest.

Let me conclude by quoting from an earlier thesis I wrote –… it may be worthwhile for the English departments to consider whether they wish to produce students who only “resent literature, or are ashamed of it” and therefore increasingly turn out to be “amateur political scientists, uninformed sociologists, incompetent anthropologists, mediocre philosophers, and overdetermined cultural historians” (Bloom, Western Canon 521).

Quoting uncle Bloom is always worth the effort of digging for an old thesis. 🙂

Phew. End of rant.

Note to self: Wow, there are people to listen to this kind of venting! You should write more in your own (long-abandoned) blog!

Neena: As I said in my reply to Rahini’s comment, I respect the study of art for anthropological purposes as a serious pursuit. I just don’t think it should get precedence over appreciating the beauty/skill of art in REVIEWS. Reviews are meant for us average Joes to know what we should watch or read or listen. We would appreciate it if reviewers can keep their political and social baggage aside and simply tell us if they thought it was good music or not.

And I am not saying B Rangan does it, as he himself said, he indulges himself in such exercise when the film is too bad to be worth writing anything ABOUT (hence, the AROUND). But the socio-cultural contextualisation of art is all over Western culture, especially music. It’s funny you mentioned Marxism in your comment. I don’t know if it was directed to MY position and you thought I am being a Marxist with regard to art. Because it is my position that the current critique of art, vide post modernism, has got too Marxist. I mean it in a different sense: the belief that any and every idiot should get a chance to write a book or make an album if the narrative of his social background is that compelling to academics. I think a PUBLISHED work intended for wide distribution to a large audience should live up to certain standards of skill. Yes, skill is relative, but you can’t relativise it to an absolute degree, which is what is happening now. See Iswarya’s comment that at this rate people may find it difficult to identify beauty in art. And if we get there, then the point of making and appreciating a work of art is lost. Also, as she says and I agree, books should be selected from the point of view of improving the appreciation of literature of the students, NOT based on the identity of the author. I don’t even get how the question of white or black assumes any relevance in this context though nothing w.r.t the present day liberal American position surprises anymore. If people hate whites so much, maybe they shouldn’t converse in a language invented by the whites. 😛

Iswarya: I have indeed come across the name of Bloom already. Sad to hear if we are going PC too. I didn’t study English in college (chose the commerce stream) but even in school, we had Lewis Carroll, Jerome K Jerome, Shakespeare, Tennyson. Hope it hasn’t changed too much.

This is a classic example of socio-cultural contextualisation gone mad and, in turn, the inability to just see a film for what it is and infer all sorts of messages into it. I vaguely remembered Gone Girl attracting feminist backlash (or should I say nauseatingly PC writers) for its portrayal of a ruthless and remarkably brilliant female protagonist. I watched the film today and found instead a beautifully shot and staged film with very memorable characters and felt Rosamund Pike outshone the wooden Ben Affleck by some distance. How chauvinist of me to say that! I remember Sidney Sheldon too created a scheming, ruthless female protagonist for Best Laid Plans (but with some of his other novels casting the woman as the victim with the classic male psychopath stereotype that nobody objects to, not even us guys). Wonder if it too attracted a PC backlash at that time? Anyway here are two such strenuously argued criticisms of Gone Girl:

Can people not get an effin’ handle? It’s supposed to be film, entertainment as they call it in Hollywood. Don’t read so much into it. Curiously my wife, having already watched the film and stopping barely short of playing spoiler, watched it a second time without ever finding it so objectionable. Maybe because, and here’s another spoiler warning, she, like the female police detective in Gone Girl, knows that not all women are goody two shoes?

Madan: It’s not even as easy as dropping those people off the syllabus. It’s about putting them in the syllabus (because they are ‘culturally important’), teaching the students to spit at them before even learning why they got placed on a pedestal, so to speak, and then bring in some enlightened PC crap into the syllabus to tell people why Shakespeare got it all wrong and Ms.Today’s-shining-light (like, say, Maya Angelou) got it all right. Try beating that! And when would anyone learn to judge art as art? Oh, that’s so 1940s!

Madan: I have no thoughts on gone girl as I have not read it. But the link given below says the same and I found myself agreeing to it. But it is completely natural that the way people perceive a work of fiction may not make sense to another. One person may feel women are being put down in a particular story and you may feel that it is just a particular woman who is being insulted. I usually feel that a single work of fiction cannot be indicative of anything significant but a bunch of well regarded works all having the same theme or tone may actually indicate something. Seeking patterns and making sensible judgements based on the patterns is what people do.

As regards the “best laid plans”, the heroine is first unceremoniously dumped by the dude and then only the entire revenge stuff begins. If I am not wrong all ssheldon heroines are the same. The basic story always is “girl is talented and beautiful, has no ambition, is romanced by a dude, dumped, she takes revenge”. Moreover there was another heroine in that novel which seems to neutralise the accusations of misogyny. I believe ssheldon was always careful about that.

@ Rahini: I have not read the original Gone Girl novel nor any other books by the writer. But the other films of Fincher that I watched – Fight Club and Social Network – weren’t misogynist. But he has a penchant seemingly for showing the self centred, ruthless side of his characters; Zuckerberg for instance disliked the way he was portrayed in Social Network. My reading of Gone Girl was that both husband and wife are shown to be rather self centred and hollow and very much bothered about appearances and what would people say, etc. The husband admits to his sister that he was happy initially that his wife was gone, something the audience already knows at that point because it is quite beautifully depicted. Maybe some people disliked this ruthless commentary on the state of affairs in first world society and decided to work the anti-feminist angle on the film! 😀 For me, I can sit back and enjoy the film but perhaps it hit too close to home for people living in USA, that is the kind of people who may somewhat resemble the protagonists of Gone Girl, idk.

I respect the right of people to have a different interpretation but I just think people should be careful before playing the racist/sexist card as it effectively amounts to slander. In this case, having read those two Guardian articles quite carefully with an open mind, I still felt their theory was far fetched and based on a (intentional?) misreading of the film. For eg, the husband’s sister is shown to be devoted and selfless throughout and the female police detective is shown to be diligent and objective. So, as Sidney Sheldon did in Best Laid Plans, there are two other positive female characters to balance out the ruthless female lead. In fact, those two are the only bright spots in a mostly grey and gloomy film. I agree with Seema Goswami’s views but then I usually do; she is usually quite sensible.

I’ve read all her books : Gone girl, Sharp objects and Dark places. All three have really screwed up heroines who come from dysfunctional families and do almost unbelievably horrible things to themselves and people around them. She is a disturbing read but I loved all three books because I really love gruesome psychological thrillers that give us a glimpse into the mind behind the crime (like Thomas Harris in Silence of the lambs and We need to talk about Kevin). I agree with Madan’s wife and with Seema Goswami (loved her article) in that I did not find her misogynistic. And I agree that artists should be given freedom of expression.

Not to say that I havent cringed while watching some scenes in certain Malayalam/ Hindi movies and most Tamil movies. And Ive blessed Frozen and Brave because so many little girls including two of my nieces (who are both crazy about Frozen) now look up to slightly different role models than the heroines of older fairy tales.

Way too late to comment here. But just got a real high on read this.
“Good music, bad music, good cinema, bad cinema – it’s all created by people in a particular moment for other people in the same moment, based on what they like, what they want, which means that a hundred years from now, a film like Ek Paheli Leela will tell people what we were like in 2015. “

Wah, what a prophetic statement, BR! Truer words have never ever been spoken. Just love it!

I tried to recollect a movie that came 100 years back, just out of curiosity to prove this statement to myself. The movie that came to my mind immediately was “Raja Harishchandra”. That did tell something.

“There’s always been some kind of snobbishness among these educated people when it comes to cinema, as if it was not as worthy as the other arts. But for better or worse, with increasingly distracted people spending less time on art and literature and suchlike, popular culture appears to have become the only culture.”

One of India’s best writers on cinema, Baradwaj Rangan, tells us why even bad films merit a review. Movies document contemporary culture for the future generations to be able to understand the curve that cinema as a barometer of pop culture follows. In other words, the movies we see today are a result of how our previous movies have largely shaped the movie culture of the country as we see it today. And in turn, these movies are also going to be a factor in the way our movies will find shape in the future.